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Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Tiptoe, Walk, and Jump

My kinders are starting to learn about long and short sounds. This is the last thing I need to teach for analysis this year. We have already learned about high vs. low, fast vs. slow, and loud vs. soft.

To learn about long and short I like to use the patterns tiptoe, walk, and jump. Tip-toe represents the two shortest sounds as it gets two sounds in the beat. Walk represents the one beat sound, and jump represents the longest sound (two beats). Jump, jumps from one beat to another. In order to practice this I normally have students jumping, tiptoeing and walking by their chairs for several days. Then I give them symbols to represent the three actions: two small dots for tip-toe, one short line for walk, and an upside down U for jump. I have students create their own patterns on the board with these symbols and we perform the actions together as a class.

This year I created a mini-composition for all the kids to work on, so EVERYONE gets a chance to create their own long and short patterns. There are only a few rules to their compositions. They have to create two lines of four beat patterns. (This means that the two dots of tip-toe must go together in a beat. You cannot separate them!) Jump has to take up two beats and you can only put a jump to beats 1 and 2, 2 and 3, or 3 and 4. (Otherwise you jump off the edge!) It is much easier to explain all of this visually to my kinders and they had no problem understanding what they needed to do.

Today, all my kinders created their own compositions and performed them for their classmates. Here are some pictures of finished compositions!

If you would like to use this composition in your own classroom, this is a forever freebie in my Teachers Pay Teachers Store and you can find it HERE. Please leave a rating and feedback if you use it, but please remember that it is free and nothing fancy by any means. Just something cute and simple! (Click the follow me link, if you haven't already, to be updated on all my future products and told about my special followers only deals.)

That's all for now!

2 comments :

  1. This is so AWESOME! I always wonder how you create these awesome worksheets. Do you use a Mac or PC? What programs do you use?!?! I wish I knew how to do this stuff.

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    1. That is a great question! You can actually create great quality worksheets by just using Microsoft Powerpoint. That is where I made this worksheet. You can also make worksheets using Microsoft Word, but I like being able to move things a little more freely on powerpoint. I personally use a PC to create my products, but you can also make products on a Mac, too. Pretty much everything can be made on powerpoint. Even my logo on my blog page was made on powerpoint. :-)

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